Too often, ideas about Indigenous culture take on the shape of loss. Take, for example, the Trail of Tears. The forced removal—at the hands of the US government in the 1830s and 1840s—of the Five Tribes from their homelands in the southeast. As many as one out of every four Cherokees died on that journey. It’s an end-of-the-world story, the total destruction of a particular way of life in a particular place. It was also the only time Cherokees appeared in my K-12 education—on a death march out of my home state of Tennessee.
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Here’s the thing. I’m a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. There I was, alive and changing in a changing world. But even in Cherokee homes, even in conversations between one Native person and another, there can sometimes be a tendency to turn ourselves towards loss, and to stay there.
To be sure, I don’t find our histories unimportant. There is power in memory, in story, in holding onto everything almost taken from us. Consider the work of Cherokee teachers, fighting for the continuation of a language with fewer than 1,500 first-language fluent speakers alive today—work that is necessary, honorable, and (I really mean this word) sacred.
But I think there’s power in the not-yet, too. As a child, I wish I had been told Indigenous stories about the future, stories that hold curiosity and possibility and wonder, for who we might be and what we might hope for.
When I was 18, I left home for Dartmouth College—a school I’d chosen for its commitment to Native education. I wasn’t sure what I’d find there. But when I thought about college as an introduction to the larger world, I wanted that world to be Indigenous. The fact that I did find that, right when I needed it, is a treasure of my life. That world, like all others, was its people: friends from different tribal nations and parts of the continent, and even far-off climates. The space between our respective childhoods stretched from Utqiaġvik, north of the Arctic Circle, down to Seminole land in Florida.
Together, we went to class. We went to parties in the basements of frats, where we tied the arms of our coats together so they would be easier to find when we were laughing and drunk. We lived in the Native American House, which we called “the house,” and pulled all-nighters writing essays at a long dining table. We took care of each other, and we sometimes hurt each other. We sent non-stop reply-all emails throughout the day, every day, to every Native student on campus, in what I now think of as an early version of a group chat.
But when we talked about our people? Still, often, we talked about loss. Our histories, as diverse as they may have been across nation and place, were understood to be histories of loss. And sometimes, for some of us, they held a well-worn anxiety of the contemporary Indian: How far am I from who I might have been?
When I heard this anxiety spoken aloud, and when I voiced it myself, I had an idea in my head for that “might”: a static idea of Cherokee identity from a fixed point in history. Maybe you do, too. For me, it was as we were at the time of Removal. The trade cloth shirts, the long skirts, the moccasins—forgetting that this blend of fashions was relatively new at the time. I think of the Cherokee syllabary, and the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper—both of which were also new.
Sometimes, against every fiber of my being, I would close my eyes and picture the hunched-over, freezing, near-death Cherokees in the 1942 painting “The Trail of Tears,” by Robert Lindneaux. This gestured to a point of imagined authenticity in my eyes, made stranger still by the fact that Lindneaux was not Cherokee. This was what I brought with me to college.
One day, a few months into my freshman year, a sophomore noticed a few of us talking about our tribes in this way, as if their stories were over. (We used to introduce ourselves with name/tribe/state. He was Winter Fox Frank/Greenville Rancheria/California.) “If one of you were to become an astronaut,” he said, “that, too, would be part of the story of your people.”
Today, this feels obvious to me. This is what it is to be a person belonging to any people. But back then, I desperately needed to hear someone tell me: You are supposed to be here, in this time and place that many others have brought you to. Even if you become something your ancestors could not have dreamed of—and even if you become something your ancestors wouldn’t have wanted to dream of—you belong to the story that came before you and continues on.
I’m a mother now, and a writer—two of the dearest parts of myself that stand on this belief.
Here’s what happened next: I spent a lot of time thinking about what Winter Fox had said. I started writing a novel about a Cherokee woman hell-bent on going to space—a new kind of image, one that gave me permission for optimism.
I graduated. I got a job as a teacher. I kept writing, with many pauses for crises of belief. Fifteen years passed since that moment with Winter Fox, years that introduced far more complicated questions than the ones I’d started with. My life spun off in directions I could never have imagined. There were good surprises and bad surprises, joy and heartbreak, the steady realization of how far I feel, sometimes, from that younger version of myself—and how close.
What I don’t feel far from, these days, not for a minute, is the Cherokee past.
Partly, this is because I no longer picture some kind of pre-Removal Cherokee authenticity that I must measure my distance from. Also, my little brother grew up to be a Cherokee historian, and he has taught me much about the complex realities of that past. I’ve found that history helpful, as it paves the way for me to do better in an Indigenous future that is also bound to be complex.
But mostly, this is because I now know what it means to change, as our ancestors surely did before us. To be surprised by your new self (who is your old self, who is yourself) in terrible ways, as well as in ways that delight you. To remember a story told to you by a parent, to laugh loudly, to hear yourself change it just a little as you tell it again.
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